Friday, 23 June 2017

Campbeltown Festival 2017

My second visit to Campbeltown for the excellent festival, which is 50% Springbank and 50% Cadenhead’s. Last year I wrote up the whole thing over three days (day one, day two, day three) with a lot of dialog about the overall experience but I’ve chilled out a bit this year and my notes just focus on the whisky, really. Besides, Frank has already written way more about it than I was going to, I would advise you take a look at his write-up, which starts here.

Suffice to say the festival was excellent again this year, and unlike last year the weather was amazing too! I packed everything from shorts to thinsulate gloves. Last year’s highlights were probably both warehouse tours, particularly the Cadenhead’s tour, and the Cadenhead’s pop-up bar, but this year the 175th anniversary tasting was the real highlight.

These were the events we went to:

Wednesday 24th May 2017:

11:30am: Springbank Society Tasting

7pm: The Springbank Distillery Dinner

Thursday 25th May 2017:

11:30am: The ‘uber-geek’ Tasting

1:30pm: Springbank Masterclass: New and forthcoming releases

3:30pm: Cadenhead Masterclass: Current bottlings and future releases

4:30pm: Springbank Warehouse Tasting

Friday 26th May 2017:

10:15am: Cadenhead Warehouse Tasting

1:45pm: Cadenhead 175th Anniversary Tasting

7pm: Cadenhead 175th Anniversary Dinner

My tasting notes are very short, and of course it’s hard to really make proper notes in a festival atmosphere where you have potentially been sipping whisky since 10:15am and lunch was a BBQed lamb burger. As some of these bottles came home with me I have been able to make better, more complete notes for those whiskies (interesting to compare these with the quick notes I made at the time). So I’ve added those notes first, then there are notes for each of the tastings we went to. Enjoy!

FULL TASTINGS

Springbank 15 years old, Open day 2017, Rum cask, 50% A⊕

Nose - Sweet, dark, plastic chairs and a BBQ restaurant. The fruit is intense - blood oranges and ripe cut mango, but balanced with great body, dusty and slightly medicinal with Vaseline and a touch of cigarette smoke. Fruitier and more obviously Springbank with water.

Body - Quite brightly peated, with charred wood and fizzing fruits. Some of the complexity and gravitas of the 21 with water.

Finish - Long and fizzing, orange wax and vanilla pastry. Finally the rum is very obvious, dry and tannic, slightly funky.

This is a lot better rounded and delicious than I remember at the tasting. They should stick some of these in the OB 15, it's cracking stuff.

Kilkerran 11 years old, triple distilled, Open day 2017, 60.3% A+

I did try a triple distilled cask at the Springbank open day bar (which was excellent), but this is the first released triple distilled bottle I believe.

Body - Sweet but rock hard, pastry and waxes underneath. Dustier and finally some peat and Campbeltown with water.

Finish - Long and fruity, pancakes and warmed honey. There is a very long tail on this, ironically soft and fruity. Chewed Sichuan peppercorns (not the really numbing ones) with water.

A much more restrained Kilkerran once the hard alcohol has had time and water. There is serious spirit underneath this though and at 15, 17, 20 these triples might be really significant.

Kilkerran Warehouse tour cask, 11 years old, full term in a rum barrel, 57.7% A+'

5/5/2006 – May 2017. The first ever indie (Cadenheads) cask of Kilkerran, although there is a “cage bottle” of Kilkerran in the display cabinet at the Ardshiel hotel.

Nose - That's much more like it, coastal and colossal, sharp, rich young Kilkerran and a good cask. Charred pineapple, strawberry laces and talcum powder, and the showers at a posh gym.

Body - Ripe and vanilla'd with French cooked pastry and big, drying tannins. Really rich, reminds me of a 10 year old peated Bunna with its intense sweetness. More cigarettes and bong water with water.

Finish - Medium to long with fisherman's friends and a slight funk.

Richer gear than the triple, but extremely accomplished and very drinkable. Kilkerran is whisky made for drinking (as it all is of course, but this really is). I've really enjoyed all these rum casks from the festival.

Springbank 21 years old, 2017 batch, 46% A⊕+'

This is, probably maybe, the batch we tasted in the Springbank warehouse tour last year! Not a festival release, just the 2017 release but we did have it at this year’s (and last year’s!) festival, plus I love it, so…

Nose - The magical thing about old Springbank is the very thing that makes it impossible to really enjoy in a festival atmosphere, unless of course it's just been valinched out of a cask. There is great restraint, and a very gentle, professional air to this, but the excellence of the 15 year old is beautifully polished down here with fruit, oil, peat, wood and warehouse all in perfect, dampened harmony. It's a glazed, sweetshop fruit, blackcurrant and cherry, but fresh and oily like a ride on a cold day on an old motorbike. And red wine cask, blackcurrant jam on vanilla pancakes and ozone.

Finish - Very long indeed, fruit right to the finish. Coffee chocolates and drying wood at the end, this pulls you in for another sip.

Springbank peaking at 15 means the 21 is ethereal, like Bowmore is at 26. But this vatting is perfectly judged for drinking, I have burned through the 10cl share I have and a bottle wouldn't last long. A life affirming whisky.

Springbank 21 years old, Open day 2017, 46% A⊕

First fill port hogshead, 252 bottles, December 1995 to May 2017

Nose - Sweeter, much more forthright than the OB 21, blackcurrant jam again but bright, mineral and perfumed. Very floral and but also quite masculine - men's deodorant and talcum powder. With time that blackcurrant is more like travel sweets, and there's really old wood behind this. After sipping, there’s better balance and more intense fruit and wood.

Body - Younger at first, sharp and slightly hot with intense black fruit and sugar but it develops into a more dusty, older fruit (the dust on the travel sweets) and retronasal petrol.

Finish - Long and really softly vanilla'd, with ice lolly sticks and orange peel at the end.

This is a uncharacteristically fruited 21 year old Springbank, intense but complex and interesting. That sharpness and youth in the initial delivery takes it off A⊕+, plus I am less into these kinds of fireworks at the moment.

Nose - Harsher, obviously new/recharred wood, with gloss paint and marker pens. Yet more black fruits here, plus twisted orange peel and in-flight orange juice. Takes a little while to acclimatise to this because the wood is so bright, but the Springbank oils are underneath with fresh, pungent honey musk and Ribena. Dustier, fruitier with water, more wood and more Springbank.

The intensity on this one is quite challenging to be honest, we had a bottle of it on our table and we struggled to finish it whereas the port cask got hoovered up. However this has lots to give as a tasting whisky.

DAY ONE

Society tasting, 24.05.2017 11:30

The annual Springbank Society tasting. This is free to members of the society (if you can get a ticket!) and used to result in selection of the next society cask. However the society is now, very sadly, too large (no thanks to bloggers) and members get angry when they can’t have their bottle because there’s not enough in a hogshead, so the society bottlings will from now on be vattings of many casks. Therefore they decided instead to do a blind tasting of a few casks and ask us to guess the cask, brand and age.

I think it would have been better to do some trial vattings and let us taste samples of them and continue picking the next society bottle, that was pretty special last year. Not that we picked the one I wanted!

As with last year, the dinner on the first night was excellent fun. It starts with a tasting of three casks, we vote on the winner and it’s bottled and handed to you on the way out. We had bottles of the winner on the table over dinner, and in the end they brought us a bottle of second place and came round with a valinch of third place!

I voted for the 2nd (port cask) but once people knew the age and saw the colour of the 3rd, the writing was on the wall.

DAY TWO

Springbank Uber Geek tasting, warehouse 10, 25.05.2017 11:30

We’ll see about uber geek, Frank and I were both, independently thinking on the way into this. I am already familiar with α-amylase and β-amylase from my adventures in homebrewing but we were both impressed with the kilning profiles, particularly for Longrow which reminded me very much of low and slow BBQ.

N - Very yellow, varnish and a little funk and cough candy. More wine-like with water, men's perfume. B - Intense, pepper and plastic. Very spicy with lots of rum funk. Sweeter, gentler, although still intense with water. F - Very long and loads of black pepper. Hot at the end. An interesting and funky whisky but way too bitter and hot at the end.

First fill port HHD, 252 bottles. Properly reviewed at the top of the post.

N - Coffee and chocolate cake, blood orange juice and pineapples. Even better with water, more fruit and chocolate. B - Clean but fruit driven, with cola bottles and sherbet dibdabs. F - Very long, loads of plum and orchard fruit right to the end with strawberry tart and raspberry sauce.

N - Holy shit. Marker pens, blackberries, cut hedges, deep and old alien Islay (although less fizzers). B - Wet wood, burnt toast and honey, slightly virgin oak. F - Medium with charred plums. Weirdly virgin oak in the finish. This has a phenomenal nose but a bit intense in the delivery. Mark asked if this should have more time in the cask - I think it needs to go in a different cask for another 5 years or it'll end up black and overcooked like the Springbank dinner bottle. Maybe into that port cask the open day bottling came out of?

N - Deeper, blacker and fruitier. At this point my note taking was cancelled by a nice fellow called Dave who had just discovered we shared a deep history in British metal and both knew all the lyrics for Sabbat's "History of a time to come" (1987)

DAY THREE

Cadenhead's Warehouse Tasting, Warehouse #9, 26.05.2017 10:15

As a highlight of last year’s festival, expectations were sky high for this. Nothing like a big load of drams at 10:15am.

N- Sweet lemon, citrus cleaner, coastal but very fresh with cigarette tobacco. Young but confident. B - Very punchy, more cleaning products, peppery with new plastic. Richer vanilla with water. F - Long and very spicy.

Another great warehouse tasting. The other timeslot had a slightly different set of casks, including a 24 year old Glen Grant, 27 year old Glentauchers and a 36 year old Blend. This was an old sherried cask bought pre-blended from Edrington containing Macallan and others, and is the sister cask used for the 36 year old sherried creations (that has some added old Invergordon I believe). I love the creations and this cask isn’t quite as good, but I got one as a curio more than anything, how strange to be buying mature blended casks from Edrington!

Cadenhead's 175th anniversary tasting, 26.05.2017 13:45

1971 Hielanman spirit drink, 45 years old, 38.8% A⊖

Glenfarclas, of course. A very old cask that had dropped under 40% (surely this would have been better in a 45 year old blend!)